Engage the significance of the Black Child as muse with artist Jennifer Mack-Watkins

Throughout her work, artist Jennifer Mack-Watkins celebrates the beauty, importance, and complexity of positive representations of African American children in literature, media, and pop culture. She is interested in aesthetics as a form of resistance against the erasure and invisibility of African American art and culture.

Join Mack-Watkins for this artist talk and activation of Margaret Burroughs’ work Girl Seated (1959) from SCAD MOA’s Walter and Linda Evans Collection of African American Art, as she explores the context and motivations behind Burroughs’ inspiration from and investigation into Black youth and childhood.

About the artist
Jennifer Mack-Watkins is a contemporary visual artist whose primary studio practice entails silkscreen and Japanese woodblock prints. Her work investigates the societal constructs that can leave women feeling isolated, resisting definitions of femininity based on widely held notions of beauty and cultural norms. Her aesthetic draws from a confluence of references, including Japanese Mokuhanga printmaking techniques and her culturally rich Southern roots. In 2015, the artist was selected to participate in the Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory residency in Yamanashi, Japan, and was a Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist nominee. Mack-Watkins is the recipient of the Elizabeth Catlett Printmaking Award, presented by the Hampton University Museum, and a grant from the National Black Arts Festival. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, Art & Object, and Essence. Originally hailing from Charleston, S.C., Mack-Watkins lives and works in both New Jersey and Georgia. She holds a B.A. in studio arts from Morris Brown College, an M.A.T. from Tufts University, and an M.F.A. in printmaking from Pratt Institute, and also serves on the Board of Trustees at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center in Vermont.